The long, tubular proboscis (arrow, left image) sported by some species of scorpionflies suggests that the insects were pollinating ancient plants including conifers (right) millions of years before flowers evolved. Credit: Photo: Wenying Wu; Illustration: Mary Parrish/National Museum of Natural History
Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth and accelerates towards Saturn. (Credit: ESA)
From Live Science:
Human speech is thought to have emerged 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, some five million years after chimps and humans took divergent paths on the tree of evolution. Photo: iStockphoto
From Time Magazine:
A loophole in EU targets on cutting CO2 emissions means that the more electric cars are produced, the more SUVs manufacturers can sell. Reuters
Facebook has become more than a diversion for Rodney Bradford. Damiano Beltrami
Last chance to lift NASA's spirit (Image: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)NASA's twin Mars rovers have outlasted their planned three-month missions for so long that they seem indestructible. Nearly six years on, their presence on the Red Planet is taken for granted, as if they are immutable parts of the Martian landscape.
But we may soon have to confront a new reality. Spirit, which has always suffered more hardships than Opportunity, is facing its toughest challenge yet. When New Scientist went to press, the rover was set to begin a risky push to free itself from a sand trap it has been mired in for six months. Mission engineers say it may not survive the attempt. "She's in a very precarious situation, and we don't know for sure if we're going to get her out," says rover driver Scott Maxwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
You Want My Hydraulic Fluid! Take My Hydraulic Fluid! Via OK.gov 
A man snorting cocaine. Photograph: Andy Drysdale/ADR
In a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement. Photo: Mario Aguilera/New York TimesWe are letting far too much plastic end up in the oceans.
ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
In 1804, a little over 200 years ago, the planet had a human population of 1 billion people. Back then the oceans seemed immense and beyond the capacity of humans to change. Yet by 1850 whale hunting peaked due to over harvesting and we've since drastically drawn down the stocks of other ocean-going creatures such as cod and salmon.
Read more ....
Artist's rendering of a tokamak plasma. The plasma is confined by the combination of strong magnetic field in the toroidal direction (around the hole in the "donut" as shown by the black arrow) generated by external coils (not shown) and the magnetic field from a large current flowing in the same toroidal direction. The plasma is held inside a sealed metal structure that is evacuated and lined with special material to keep the plasma pure and handle the heat exhaust. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)
A new computer model that simulates how dust comes into and out of homes found that most indoor dust originates outside. The model may help communities figure out how to best clean up contaminated waste sites. Credit: Stockxpert.
An M1A1 70-ton tank crosses a bridge made from Axion's thermoplastic composite at Camp Mackall in North Carolina. (Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army/Dawn Elizabeth Pandoliano)
From Discovery News:
Planets grow in the dusty discs that form around infant stars
USS New York makes her way up the Hudson River.
AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.
Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.
Robot At The Helm? courtesy of the Department of Defense 
From Watts Up With That?
From Future Pundit:A drug that turns off the nogo receptor 1 blocks long term memory formation in mice. Imagine a drug that did the same thing in humans. It would have all sorts of uses and abuses.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a mechanism that controls the brain's ability to create lasting memories. In experiments on genetically manipulated mice, they were able to switch on and off the animals' ability to form lasting memories by adding a substance to their drinking water. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal PNAS, are of potential significance to the future treatment of Alzheimer's and stroke.
From The Bloomberg:
Electron beam freeform fabrication process. (Credit: NASA)
Photo: Kindle DX. (Credit: Amazon)
Government scientists have developed a population of honeybees that can root out the Varroa mite, a main culprit in a honeybee die-off. Getty Images
From The BBC:
The Rosetta probe will fly by Earth on Friday (Illustration: ESA/C. Carreau)What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.
The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.
Unprecedented: A beautiful composite image of the Milky Way centre using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory
From The Threat Level:Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.
Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter (.pdf) demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”
An offshore wind farm in north Wales, U.K. (Credit: Vestas)
Example of a laser wakefield simulated in a “Boosted Frame”. Electrons (colored tubes) are injected and accelerated by surfing the wave (blue surfaces) generated by a laser pulse. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)
From Live Science:
Photo: Seeing the light: A new contact lens technology responds to UV light. The contact lens on the left (blue) contains photochromic dyes that darken the lens in the presence of UV light. The contact lens on the right (clear) contains no dyes. Credit: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology 
An artists rendering of a solar sail is shown in this undated publicity image from The Planetary Society released to Reuters. Backers of a failed mission to launch the world's first solar-sail spacecraft unveiled plans on Monday to try again five years later with a smaller, swifter satellite to test the limits of sunlight propulsion. (Handout/REUTERS) 
President Barak Obama lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns as part of Veterans Day services at Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 11, 2009. VA courtesy photo
Popular: More than 34 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.
Jaxa's vision of a space solar power system (SSPS) Photo: AFP 
Microsoft is using Wolfram Alpha to help power certain results, such as this search
From Time Magazine:
This digital image shows how autonomous underwater explorers (AUEs) will be used to provide new information about the oceans. Credit: SIO
A nuclear bomb test is shown in Nevada, Aug. 18, 1957. Nuclear or near nuclear war/engagement between any two nations could have a hand in human extinction, research concludes. Getty ImagesHumans could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event, aside from complete destruction of the globe, could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent, either malicious or not, by people in power.
The determinations suggest that the human race itself will ultimately determine its fate.
Read more ....
The A160 hummingbird, just one of many DARPA project that have found militaryON 6 December 1957 a hollow aluminium sphere the size of a small melon burst from a blazing fireball, rose a mere metre or so above Florida before landing with a thump. The US was in trouble. A month earlier, the Soviet Union had sent a 500-kilogram capsule bearing a dog called Laika into space. But here was the US unable to even notch up its first foray into orbit.
President Dwight Eisenhower responded by creating a new research agency tasked with ensuring such "technological surprises" like Sputnik would never be sprung on the US again. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), conceived in February 1958 not only still exists, it has consistently made the US military the most advanced on Earth and unleashed life-changing technologies such as the internet, GPS and the computer mouse along the way.
London Calling Your Internet activities are no longer for your eyes only Simdaperce 
